Talyesin's Tales

Taking to the skies with his teammates to repel an invasion from another reality, Squirrelman finds himself captured by the enemy. Brought aboard the mother ship, a flying Chinese junk, along with Kosmos Konstantinopoulos' powered bodyguard Achilles, Squirrelman and his companion take on their captors and with the help of his team, assault the ship's bridge. But their attack renders the ship incapable of flight, and, falling toward the city below, Achilles activates his mass teleportation system...





I hate teleporting.

Every time it happens to me, I wind up puking my guts up. Usually I'm lucky enough to get my mask off in time for my stomach to empty itself. That one time I didn't was a mess I wouldn't care to repeat.

So I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a little relieved that Achilles' little gizmo has no effect, even though we're plummeting to our deaths.

"Hell with this," I say, and dive back through the hole we made in the floor. Everyone follows. Physique gets her skycycle going and we're out the broken window and into the air, roughly a second before the flying junk hits the block below us, sending the buildings crumbling to the street below.

"I thought you said to relax!" I yell at Achilles over the sounds of destruction.

"I did!"

"It didn't work, you idiot!"

"What are you talking about? I didn't use it on us, moron! I used it to clear that block of every living thing!"

Okay, so it was a good idea. Doesn't mean he's less of an ass.

"You could have told us!" I yell at him.

"Squirrelly, let it drop," Ragdoll says. Which is odd enough, so I do.

We let Achilles off on the street and good riddance. We swoop back into the air. The majority of the invasion has been repulsed, so we go help out with the clean up, particularly in the block of ruined buildings that the flying junk crashed into.

Bozo's right - not a living creature in the whole block, except for the few wounded surviving Mongols we find in the wreckage of the junk.

"See now, that's what I'm talking about," Ace says, grinning, once the invasion is ended and the hole in the sky is closed again. Cops are rounding up the surviving Mongols for alternity deportation.

"What is?" I ask.

"We repulsed a Gardner Violation, son!"

"Well... we helped."

"We did more than that, we took out their mother ship!"

"Really," Ragdoll says. "Is that how you see it?"

"Well... yeah! How else can we see it?"

"We went in over our heads and got lucky? Because that's how I'm seeing it," she answers.

"Over our heads? We stood up and were counted with the Big Leagues, Rags."

"You don't get to call me that." Her voice is hard and flat and she's really pissed.

Ace, amazingly, seems to sense this. He notches back his enthusiasm a little.

"Look... All I'm saying is, we played in the Big Leagues tonight and held our own."

"We got lucky. We could have just as easily gone in a different window, just as easily wound up NOT under the bridge, just as easily NOT accidentally shorted out the control panel. It was too much luck."

"I don't see it that way at all. We would have found a way to take it out regardless."

Ragdoll doesn't have anything to say about that. She changes tack.

"Is this what you see for our team? Alien invasions, cosmic threats? Because that's beyond our abilities and you know it."

"I don't know any such thing, Ragdoll. I think when we work together we can pretty much take on anything that gets thrown our way. What do you see for our team? Busting B&Es and pushers? I think we can do that, and more besides."

"All I'm saying is, this cosmic level shit is better dealt with by the teams with the experience and ability to handle it. Team Title, the Sterlings, even TeenSupreme. They handle this sort of thing all the time. We have to know our strengths and weaknesses and keep them both in mind. We all know Doc Sterling could be the World's Greatest Detective if he wanted to, but he isn't wired that way. He's in a different headspace. He deals with cosmic shit on a daily basis."

"That doesn't stop him from doing what he can, when he can, about the less cosmic stuff," I say quietly.

She turns to me and gives me this odd look. Part, stay out of this, part, you should be on my side here, part, not you too.

"Look..." I say. "What we're talking about here is responsibility. I think we can all agree that we spend more time as costumed crimefighters dealing with street crime than we spend gallivanting through space and time... Although we've done our share of that too. Our specialty, then, is fighting crime. But sometimes, crime isn't just breaking the laws of our city or state or country, sometimes it's crimes against humanity or nature or reality. And we'll fight those crimes too. Ultimately, it's all about protecting the people, the city, the world we love, from whoever might cause them harm. We're not going to say, oh sorry, this one is out of our area of responsibility, I guess the city gets destroyed because we're too busy stopping muggers and shoplifters."

Ragdoll smiles a little at that one. A tiny bit of her aggressive tension seeps out of her stance.

"A group of folks, working together, fighting crime, whichever kind of crime that might be," Physique says. "Sounds like a league of our own to me."

"A crimefighters league," I say, and this smile starts to creep onto my face. "THE Crimefighters League."

Physique is grinning her huge gorgeous grin. Ace is smiling too. Even Ragdoll has this look on her face that says, since you put it that way...

I don't know why I do it. It's cornball as all hell. It's in every movie you'll ever see about friends coming together to overcome adversity. But I have to do it. Some things have too much dramatic rightness about them.

I put my fist out into the middle of our little foursome.

"The Crimefighters League," I say.

Physique covers my hand with hers. Ace next. Ragdoll, almost reluctantly, is last.

"The Crimefighters League," Physique says, nodding, a big satisfied smile on her face.

"The Crimefighters League," Ace repeats it, grinning like hell.

"The Crimefighters League," Ragdoll gives in. "For better or worse."